According to Kommersant, the Ministry of Internal Affairs is dissatisfied with the performance of servers based on Russian Elbrus processors. The manufacturer JSC "MCST" is aware of the problem and promises to solve it in new releases of its products.
The structures of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, within the framework of the import substitution project, began to switch to servers based on the Russian Elbrus 8C processor (8 cores, operating frequency 1.3 GHz, 4th generation Elbrus architecture).
As part of this process, it turned out that it was not so easy to quickly transfer the current IT infrastructure to new servers. The low rate of migration is associated with the difficulties encountered by engineers when launching and operating Russian servers. For example, as Kommersant wrote, a letter to the manufacturer states that they do not support booting the operating system from storage media, “which does not allow for a sufficient level of fault tolerance for software and hardware systems.”
Also, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had difficulties on new servers when working with domestic system software. The agency plans to conduct additional server performance testing with the manufacturer in early 2022 to show where and how domestic solutions need to be finalized to meet the needs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The MCST representative explained that the company is working on solving the problems. “We found a solution to the problems of I/O speed — updating the OS and the correct configuration of the application software, while the indicators were increased several times. We are preparing an update to load the OS, ”MCST clarified. Industry experts believe that this was the first stage of testing, and MCST will soon present for tests productive multiprocessor servers based on Elbrus-16C chips (16 cores, operating frequency 2.0 GHz, Elbrus architecture of the 6th generation), which has not yet entered the market and Baikal-S (16 nm, 48 ARM-Cortex A75 cores with a frequency of up to 2.2 GHz), which is expected on the market in 2022.
According to the Russian edition of Forbes, the supplier of servers for the Ministry of Internal Affairs explained that in the first quarter of 2022, he will begin installing Elbrus 8SV to replace the Elbrus 8C processors, in which many of the flaws have been corrected by the manufacturer.
The head of advanced research at Astra Linux Group of Companies told the publication that the company is aware of the problems of compatibility of domestic processors with Russian software, but this can be solved. Astra Linux developers are now refining many of these points with each customer to provide the optimal solution for their business processes, application scenarios, specific software, and performance and security requirements.
Now on the market there are Russian servers and storage systems based on Elbrus-8C processors (two- and four-processor), Elbrus-4C, dual-processor solutions based on the more modern Elbrus-8SV and an entry-level server on Baikal-M .
Currently, in Russia, Baikal Electronics (Baikal series processors based on the ARM architecture) and JSC MCST (processors based on the Elbrus architecture) are developing their processors and releasing them in large volumes for government agencies and companies. All modern processors of the Baikal and Elbrus series are manufactured at the Taiwanese TSMC factory. Russian manufacturers do not have the equipment and technology for the production of such systems (65 nm is still being introduced). In Taiwan, SPC Elvis is also ordering the production of the Skif system-on-a-chip, which manufacturers plan to implement on Russian mobile devices in 2022.
In early December, Sber summed up the results of testing Russian servers based on Elbrus-8C processors and was completely dissatisfied with the performance of these systems. Sber did not disclose the results of testing the performance of Russian servers, but its representative specified that they were "unexpectedly and very pleasantly surprised." The company expected that the backlog from servers based on the 20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6230 processor would be 20-30 times, but in fact domestic solutions turned out to be only several times slower.
Also in December, other large Russian companies (VTB, DIT of Moscow, Rostelecom, Rosatom, Rostec, AK ALROSA, Russian Post) tested servers on domestic processors and are still dissatisfied with their performance. Representatives of the companies explained that the available servers with Russian processors on the market have low performance, they have unbalanced and often overestimated power consumption. In their opinion, most models of Russian servers cost the same as modern foreign solutions that pass tests faster and have good energy efficiency.
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